How Tos

iOS 8 tips - How to save battery on iPhone and iPad (iOS 8 edition)

8 ways to fix battery life issues

iOS 8 tips - How to save battery on iPhone and iPad (iOS 8 edition)
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iOS
iOS 8

Want to know how to maximise the battery life on your iPhone or iPad? In this guide we'll share some advice to help keep your phone alive for as long as humanly possible.

It's written with iOS 8 in mind, which adds new features to assess your battery usage. And some new fancy features that will guzzle your battery fast if left unchecked.

Battery usage

First things first, you want to see what is killing your battery in the first place. iOS 8 lets you assess your battery drain on an app-by-app basis so you can easily detect energy hogs.

Simply go into the Settings app, choose 'General', tap 'Usage', and go into 'Battery Usage'. From here you can see the time since last full charge and battery usage in the last day and week.

If one app is taking up a lot of battery you may want to turn off that app's background refresh or notifications, or stop using it altogether.

Background app

Background App Refresh, which was added in iOS 7, is a way for apps to get new data when not in use, so they're up to date as soon as you load them.

It's a cool feature, but it can be a major battery drain. Either turn off individual apps that you don't need to update continually, or shut off the feature entirely. You can find it in 'General', 'Background App Refresh' in the Settings app.

Think about the way you use each app. It takes a couple seconds to grab your latest tweets when you load up a Twitter client - do you need to continuously update your timeline when you're not using it?

Location services

Location Services are another battery hog. Open Settings, go to 'Privacy', and find 'Location Services'.

Keep it on for apps where you want it to know your location. If you like to share your location when you Tweet, keep it on for Twitter. But if you never use IMDB's cinema show times feature, revoke its access to your location, here.

Push notifications

Push notifications can also hurt your battery life. And like background app refresh and location services, you've probably got some turned on that you don't need.

To tweak these settings open the Settings app and choose 'Notifications'. Now you'll see a list of every installed app that can send notifications. Go into apps that you don't care about and uncheck 'Allow Notifications'.

Fetch

You have more options when dealing with the default Mail app. Find 'Mail, Contacts, Calendars' in Settings and tap on 'Fetch New Data'.

Push email will send emails from the mail server to your iOS device as soon as they arrive, which can hurt your battery. You may wish it to turn this setting off and use a fetch schedule.

This only looks for emails every 15 or 30 minutes, or every hour, or only when you go into the Mail app and refresh your inbox. Use whichever suits you best.

Kill apps

A couple tips from ex-Apple Genius Bar staffer Scotty Loveless, who has got a huge and exhaustive guide to battery drain if you want even more information.

First, stop manually closing all your apps. For starters, it's unnecessary: iOS is automatically juggling memory, putting apps in suspended animation, and killing unused memory hogs all by itself.

But more importantly for this article, constantly having to load and unload apps from your phone's random access memory is bad for battery. "All of that loading and unloading puts more stress on your device than just leaving it alone', says Loveless.

If you love manually clearing up apps so much, buy an Android.

Airplane Mode

Another tip from Loveless: using your iPhone when you're in an area with crappy service can also kill the battery as the phone puts strain on its antenna to try to keep receiving phone calls and text messages.

If you're in the middle of nowhere (or inside a building that cuts off phone signal) and you don't need to use the phone right now, turn on airplane mode.

Plus, you can actually turn wi-fi back on after you enter airplane mode to continue using the web.

Brightness

Changing your screen brightness can have a massive impact on your phone's battery life. Keeping it at the highest setting is a sure fire way to drain your battery (and destroy your corneas).

Set it to about 60 percent. You'll soon get used to it, and you can squeeze many minutes of battery out of your device.

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer